Yesterday afternoon at around 3 p.m., Dallas police were sent to check out a silver Pontiac sedan parked suspiciously in an Oak Cliff alley. Officers waited for the driver to pull away, then performed a traffic stop on the 2400 block of Brooklyn Avenue after the car made an illegal turn.

Police arrested the driver, 24-year-old Jesus Gonzalez, for driving without a license and not wearing a seat belt. But a search of the vehicle turned up something not commonly found during routine traffic stops: 15 AK-style assault rifles.

Police suspect Gonzalez is in the country illegally. He was taken to Dallas County jail where he is being detained at the request of DPD. He has not yet been formally charged.

Police spokeswoman Sherri Jeffrey said the department has no information on how Gonzalez came to be in possession of such a large number of assault weapons, where they came from, or what he planned to do with them.

The case has been forwarded to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms, which is taking the lead on the case, and which, given recent history, may have a pretty good idea about how an illegal immigrant would end up with 15 AKs in his trunk. We have a call into the agency's Dallas spokesman for more details.

Update at 1:14 p.m.: ATF spokesman Andrew Young says that, yes, his agency is investigating and that federal charges against Gonzalez are pending. The bureau is in the process of fingerprinting the guns and tracing them back to where they originated.